


Two for Joy

by ishafel



Series: Same Old Story [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alpha/Omega, Alternate Universe, Gen, M/M, Mpreg, Post Mpreg, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-25 08:20:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6187219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Motherhood is the easy part.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two for Joy

It takes Seb until 3 AM to get his shit together enough to move, and another half an hour after that to pack. He leaves almost everything, his own stuff because he can’t be bothered and Isobel’s because he can’t bear to look at it. He takes the trash out and locks up, although he doesn’t think he’ll ever be back. And then he opens the door to the street and sees John Watson hobbling up the walk, lamer than Seb’s ever seen him.

Seb melts back into the shadows, a hand on the cool, textured grip of the Luger, and waits. Watson blows by without noticing him and goes up. Seb could clear out-- this is his last chance, probably. But Watson doesn’t have Isobel with him. All he can think is, what if something’s wrong. What if--.

He goes after Watson, taking the stairs two at a time. Watson’s banging on the door to the flat like a man possessed and Seb says from behind him, “Looking for me?”

Watson whirls around and punches him in the nose. Seb half dodges it, which at least saves him from a broken nose, but it hurts like a bitch and he puts his hand up to touch it. It comes away bloody, which is just fantastic. “What the fuck?”

“Your daughter’s been crying for the last eleven hours,” Watson says bitterly. “Won’t eat, won’t sleep--.”

“She’s all right, then?”, Seb demands.

“Like you care. Where are you off to, Moran? Do you have people to shoot and cities to burn?”

It feels like being hit again. “What do you mean?”

“You were pretty eager to give her up, weren’t you? Tired of playing happy families?”

“If I thought there was a chance you’d let me see her ever again,” Seb says tiredly, “there is nothing I wouldn’t do.”

“Then come with us to London,” Watson says, “and be her mother.”

Seb is beyond even hope. “I-- are you serious?”

“Pax,” Watson says. “Amnesty. Come in from the cold. Lay down your arms. Mycroft says you were never the real problem and if you behave yourself he’ll let you be.”

Seb slides the safety back on and sets the Luger gently back on the floor. “Okay,” he says. “You only had to say so.”

“You’ve got ten minutes to pack anything else you might want,” Watson says. “I’m not sure they can stand more than ten minutes of your baby.”

“She’s your baby, too,” Seb says, unlocking the door. “Wait, you didn’t leave her with Holmes, did you?”

Watson actually grins at that. “Certainly not. I left her and Sherlock both with Myctoft’s assistant, which is quite possibly a form of torture.” 

He and Seb dump clothes and books and toys into garbage bags, and after a minute Seb says awkwardly, “Her name is Isobel. And she doesn’t sleep much, but other than that, you’ll like her, I think. She’s really smart-- for a baby, at least-- I know this wasn’t something you wanted, though.”

Watson turns to look at him. “No,” he says, “it really wasn’t. But now it’s happened, I’m sure we’ll all manage.”

He doesn’t want her. It doesn’t matter, though, because Seb wants her, and he’ll make sure she never knows the difference.

The big black car is parked three blocks away, and despite the cold Sherlock is standing outside it. Seb drops his bags on the curb and reaches for the door handle, but before he can touch it the door opens and Anthea shoves Isobel into his arms. “I’ve done a lot of things for Mycroft,” she says bitterly, “but I never signed on to babysit.”

Isobel’s beyond screaming; instead she’s making a sad whimpering sound that tears at Seb’s heart and makes his breasts leak through the binding. “Oh, love,” he says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He leaves Watson and Anthea to sort out the baggage and climbs into the car, fumbling his coat and shirt open one- handed. Isobel nurses single-mindedly and he rests his chin on the top of her head. 

When he opens his eyes again, Sherlock is watching him. “My brother’s an omega, you know,” he says. “I’m trying to imagine him in this situation. Although of course he’s a good bit fatter than you are.”

Watson looks in, blushes, and turns away. “Sorry,” he says. “But you are thin. I’ve got a mate in OB at the hospital who treats omegas a lot-- we can have her take a look at both of you once we get back to London.”

“Sure,” Seb says, because he’s very aware that from here on out, Watson and the Holmes brothers own him. 

London is every bit as gray and grim as Glasgow was, but it’s still home, and Seb feels a little better as they turn on to Baker Street. 

He goes to Watson’s doctor and gets a prescription for something new, a medication developed especially for nursing alphas, that’s supposed to level out his hormones. He sleeps in Watson’s bedroom with Isobel and Watson sleeps on the couch. He meets Mrs. Hudson. He does the cooking and some of the cleaning, and takes over making sure there’s always milk and tea and biscuits and actual food in the cupboards.

In a lot of ways it’s like nothing’s changed; Watson works eighteen hour shifts and crashes when he’s home, and Sherlock isn’t exactly company. Seb’s exactly the person he thought he was safe from ever becoming, a stay-at-home omega and a single mother in everything but name. 

The worst part is that he doesn’t even mind. The meds really do level him out, to the point where he can barely imagine why he ever wanted to jump out of planes or jog fifteen kilometres in the rain or spend twelve hours on top of a building in the broiling sun waiting for a shot. He can’t read, can’t even watch t.v., but everything goes by in a pleasant, blurry fog.

Seb sleeps when Isobel does, in hour-long stretches, and talks about Princess Kate and the Kardashians with the other mothers in the park. He takes Isobel to the zoo once, on a rare warm May morning, but something about the animals in their big, pleasant pens freaks him out and they have to leave.

Watson doesn’t talk to Seb if he can help it, doesn’t show any more interest in Is than he ever did, but Seb doesn’t mind. She’s his daughter, not Watson’s, not in any way that matters. In contrast, Sherlock clearly finds her fascinating. He even offers to babysit, but Seb’s afraid he’ll come back and find her half dissected. He doesn’t have anywhere else to go most of the time anyway.

In mid-June Watson and Holmes disappear for ten days straight, and Seb wonders vaguely if they’re dead or only off fighting crime, and whether he should do something about it. A week in, he leaves the baby with Mrs. Hudson, who’s nearly beside herself, and takes a cab to the anonymous gray building from which Mycroft Holmes runs the government. He hasn’t got an appointment and they don’t let him in, but he decides it counts as a try, anyway. 

Afterward he stands in the street staring up at Holmes’ office window, remembering the way it had looked through the crosshairs of his rifle, missing the stillness that came with preparing for a target.

He hasn’t shot anyone since before Isobel was born, and Christ he misses it.

“Sebastian?”, someone says from behind him, and he whirls around, hand going for a weapon that isn’t there, before he remembers that he left them all behind to clear the metal detector. He wasn’t well known in this part of London, but coincidences happen.

It’s his father. August Moran is nearing seventy, he must be, but he still looks the same. He looks like Seb, although his fair hair has gone entirely silver now. Seb hasn’t seen him in eight or nine years, since before things in Iraq went south and he fell into bed with Moriarty. “Dad,” he says, braced for a blow that doesn’t come.

August puts his hand out, but gently, touching Seb’s cheek as if Seb were made of glass. “I thought I’d never see you again,” he breathes. “You disappeared off the face of the fucking earth.”

“Sorry,” Seb says. He feels as if he’s miles away from his body, watching this happen to someone else. He feels like that a lot, lately. “You said not to come begging to you when it went wrong, that I was going to fuck it up the way I always did and you weren’t going to fix it.” He doesn’t mean to say it, but somehow he can’t keep the words in.

“I wanted to stop you,” August says. “No parent wants to see their child in the line of fire. You can’t understand until you’re there, I suppose.” He hugs Seb hard, and it’s so unexpected Seb flinches back.

“I have a child, actually,” he says, to erase the hurt on his father’s face. “But she’s a bit young yet to make decisions like that. I guess I’ll see.”

August is delighted. For what’s maybe the first time in Seb’s life, he asks questions and actually listens to the answers. Seb talks more than he has in months, now that there’s someone to care.

When he winds down his father says, “I’d begun to think I’d never have a grandchild. Poor Fleur can’t; you know how it works for female alphas sometimes.”

Seb actually doesn’t; he’s never had much interest in that end of the spectrum. Still, he feels a moment of pity for his younger sister, who had been distant and occasionally stern but never unkind. “Isobel is an omega,” he says, even though she’s far too young to be tested and he’s not at all sure it’s true. 

It’s his father’s turn to flinch, now, but August takes it better than Seb expected. “She’ll still be my heir, Sebastian. You always minded-- that-- more than the rest of us.”

“It’s easier not to mind when you’re not the one with the limits,” Seb says, but either time or the drugs have dulled his moral outrage. Still, while he’s always been comfortable in his own body, he isn’t sure it’s what he wants for Isobel. For the first time he wonders how much of August Moran’s disappointment was with him, and how much was for him.

“I should go,” he says. “I left Isobel with a neighbor.”

His father catches his arm. “Sebastian-- Seb, wait. Is he a good man, this alpha of yours? Does he treat you well? You look as though you’ve been ill.”

“He isn’t my alpha,” Seb says. “But yes, he’s a good man. This wasn’t something he wanted, but we’re making the best of it.”

August must see something in his face, because he lets Seb go, but he looks concerned. That was always the trouble with August, of course. He’d been an alpha father with an omega son, indulgent except when it really mattered, but he’d always loved Seb and wanted him happy. Now he says, “Well, I’d like to meet your daughter, Sebastian. I’d like to see you more than once every ten years in the street, if it wouldn’t be too much to ask--.”

Seb gives him a number, out of guilt, which doesn’t matter because it’s a burner phone, and the Baker Street address, which is probably foolish.

When he and Isobel get home from the park three days later, Sherlock and Watson are there, covered in bruises and eating Chinese food on the sofa. Seb doesn’t ask where they’ve been. 

He takes Isobel upstairs and puts her down for her nap and then goes into the bathroom for water. He looks at the little bottle of pills with his name on the label and then in the mirror, thinking about what his father had said. He does look ill, his eyes dark with tiredness, his hair too long, his face thin and gray and almost unrecognizable.

He stops taking the pills and two days later he’s sicker than he’s ever been in his life, and that counts food poisoning his first tour in Afghanistan and a couple of truly epic hangovers. He has to call Mrs. Hudson and ask her to let herself in and get Isobel because he can’t get up from the bathroom floor to open the door. 

And that still isn’t the worst part, even when she threatens to call Watson or an ambulance, in no particular order, and only leaves when he promises to shoot her, or possibly himself.

It gets worse, because Sherlock comes in and stares down at him. “If I’d known this was what you were on, we could have been having so much fun,” he says.

“I’m not on heroin,” Seb says, and closes his eyes. The tile floor is cool under his cheek, at least, although from this angle he can see that it’s not remotely clean. “Will you please fuck off and let me die in peace?”

Sherlock leans over and takes his wrist to check his pulse. “You’ll live,” he says cheerfully. “But next time you want to do this in a rehab center.”

“There’s not going to be a next time.”

“Oh,” Sherlock says, “I always tell people that, too.”

He must fall asleep after that, or pass out, because the next thing he remembers is the sting of a needle going in. Whatever Watson gives him, it takes the edge off the nausea, and dials the pain in his head from an eleven down to a six. Eventually he even manages to get up and rinse out his mouth and splash water on his face and stagger downstairs. 

Mrs. Hudson, Isobel, and Watson all give him disapproving looks. He sits on the floor beside Isobel, which makes her smile. She’s started crawling, which means she’s a handful and a half ordinarily, but just now she’s content to sit propped against his leg, Sophie’s ear in her mouth. 

“Thank you for watching her,” he says to Mrs. Hudson as she gets up to go, and that’s another one disarmed. That leaves Watson, who isn’t going to be charmed or even sympathetic, and Seb still feels far too ill to put in an effort. “Sorry to drag you out of work,” he says instead.

“Tell me it was methadone instead of heroin,” Watson snarls. “Tell me you weren’t taking heroin and breastfeeding.”

Seb stares at him. “Of course I wasn’t. Other than that prescription your doctor mate gave me, I haven’t had more than a couple of aspirin since I found out I was pregnant. And she promised me that was safe.”

Sherlock clatters down the stairs and tosses Seb’s pill bottle to Watson. “Doloxa,” he says cheerfully. “Also known as Dolophine, or Dolphin, or Dolly, or Dose--.”

“Shit,” Seb says, “shit, really?”

“Rebranded and sold as the perfect way to keep your mouthy, restless omega baby mama exactly where you want him. Barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen-- although probably not pregnant, since I’m guessing it’s a fairly good heat suppressant--.”

“Shut up,” Watson says to him. “You know that wasn’t what I wanted. I told her I thought he was depressed, that was all. I’m sorry, Moran,” he says, finally, to Seb. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Seb lies, because it isn’t okay. He never even did coke, no matter how hard Jim pushed it. “It didn’t hurt Isobel, did it?”

Watson looks at him for the first time since he came to London, and then he looks at Isobel. “No,” he says. “It’s safe for breastfeeding.” 

He gets up and sits on the floor, too, and tilts Isobel’s chin so that she look up at him. She puts out her hands and grabs for his jumper, which is particularly hideous. He grins down at her, and then over at Seb, and Seb can practically see his heart melting.

He’s too tired to even smile, but he says, “I told you she was spectacular.”


End file.
